Liberation (130 page)

Kleiser, Randal (Randy) (b. 1946).
American film director, writer, and producer. He made a prize-winning film,
Peege
, as his master's thesis at USC. Then he directed episodes of popular T.V. series, followed by T.V. films such as “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” (1976) and “The Gathering” (1977). He became famous with
Grease
(1978). Other films include
The Blue Lagoon
(1980) and
Honey, I Blew Up the Kids
(1992). He teaches at USC and in Europe.

Knight, Franklin (Frank) (
circa
1924–2005).
American monk of the Ramakrishna Order; he was given the name Asima Chaitanya when he took his brahmacharya vows, probably in 1965 or 1966, and came to be known as Asim. He first joined the Trabuco monastery in about 1955 and settled there permanently, but Swami Prabhavananda never allowed him to take sannyas because of an episode—referred to by Isherwood in his diary entry for December 16, 1963—in which he behaved inappropriately towards a woman outside the congregation. Knight was a cousin of Webster Milam, and is mentioned in
D.1
and appears in
D.2.

Knott, Harley.
A son of Francis Bacon's sister Ianthe; she married a South African farmer, settled with him in southernmost Rhodesia, then moved to the Transvaal after his death.

Knox, Ronnie (1935–1992).
American football player and aspiring writer, born in Illinois. His real name was Raoul Landry. He was a football All-American for Santa Monica High School, a star freshman quarterback for the University of California, and widely considered to be the most talented college football player in the country when in 1953 he suddenly transferred to UCLA, sacrificing a year of eligibility and generating a scandal. He was also written up as a glamor boy because of his physical beauty. As a professional, he joined the Canadian Football League and played for Montreal. Later he wrote fiction, and published at least one of his stories. He lived with Renate Druks from 1960 to 1964, and afterwards had a French girlfriend called Véronique. All three sat for Bachardy several times. Knox died unemployed and virtually homeless in San Francisco. He is the chief model for Kenny in
A Single Man
. He appears in
D.2.

Korda, Michael (b. 1933).
Editor in chief at Isherwood's American publisher, Simon & Schuster, from 1968 until he retired in 2005. Born in London and educated at Oxford, he settled in New York in his twenties and became Henry Simon's editorial assistant in 1958. He wrote several books of his own. He is a nephew of film impresario Alexander Korda.

Kramer, Terry Allen.
Broadway producer. She was an heiress to her father's Manhattan investment bank, Allen and Co., which owned, among other things, a controlling interest in Syntex Chemicals Inc., developer of the oral contraceptive pill. Her second husband, Irwin Kramer, worked in his family's hotel and then became a partner in her father's firm. Irwin Kramer adopted her daughter, Toni Phillips (b. 1956), from her first marriage. Among the Broadway shows she produced, many with Harry Rigby, are
Knock Knock
(1976),
I Love My Wife
(1979),
A Meeting by the River
(1979),
Sugar Babies
(1982),
Me and My Girl
(1989),
Shadowlands
(1991), and
The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?
(1992).

Krishna.
One of the most widely worshipped Hindu gods, a hero of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavatam. Krishna was also the Sanskrit name given to George Fitts, an American monk of the Ramakrishna Order, from New England. He joined the Vedanta Society in Hollywood in 1940 and was living there as a probationer monk in 1943 when Isherwood moved in. He was then about forty years old, had some private wealth, and spent his time obsessively tape recording and transcribing Swami Prabhavananda's lectures and classes. He took his brahmacharya vows in 1947, and early in 1958, he took sannyas and became Swami Krishnananda. He lived in Hollywood, but usually accompanied Swami on trips to Santa Barbara, Trabuco, and elsewhere. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Krishnamurti (1895–1986).
Hindu spiritual teacher. As an impoverished boy in India, he was taken up by the leaders of the Theosophical movement as the “vehicle” in which their Master Maitreya would reincarnate himself. He was adopted and educated in England, then in 1919 sent to an orange ranch in Ojai, California, for his health. In 1929, he renounced his messianic role and rejected the guru–disciple relationship along with the devotional and ritual aspects of Hinduism. Although he broke with the Theosophists, he went on speaking to devotees, sometimes in huge numbers, for the rest of his life all around the world. He was extremely handsome and charismatic and had many secret sexual liaisons which introduced tension among his followers and led to a series of lawsuits with a colleague and rival, Desikacharya Rajagopalacharya, whom he cuckolded. Isherwood first met Krishnamurti in 1939 through Aldous and Maria Huxley and later went to hear him speak in Ojai. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2

Krost, Barry.
British agent and film and T.V. producer, formerly a child actor. He appeared in a few films in the 1950s. He was John Osborne's manager for about ten years, then settled in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. He founded the Los Angeles talent agency Barry Krost Management and promotes gay and lesbian rights in the film industry. As a producer, he works with his long-time companion, Douglas Chapin.

Ladner, John (b. 194[6]).
American lawyer, educated at Berkeley and Loyola School of Law, admitted to the California Bar in 1973. He worked in Washington, D.C. and New York for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, was a Public Defender in Los Angeles from 1977 to 1979, and until 1983 ran his own practice specializing in criminal and juvenile defense. He later spent twenty years as a Municipal and Superior Court Commissioner and presided over California's criminal child support enforcement court. His longterm companion is Mark Lipscomb.

Lambert, Gavin (1924–2005).
British novelist, biographer and screenwriter; educated at Cheltenham College and for one year at Magdalen College, Oxford. He edited the British film magazine
Sight and Sound
, before going to Hollywood in 1956. He was working for Jerry Wald at Twentieth Century-Fox on
Sons and Lovers
(1960) when Ivan Moffat introduced him to Isherwood; he appears often in
D.1
and
D.2
. His novel
The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life
(1959), which Isherwood read in manuscript in 1957, was influenced by Isherwood's Berlin stories. He and Isherwood worked on a television comedy project “Emily Ermingarde” for Hermione Gingold and later for Elsa Lanchester, but the series was never produced. Lambert also helped Isherwood revise the film script of
The Vacant Room
. During the 1950s and early 1960s, he planned a musical version, never produced, of Thackeray's novel
Vanity Fair
. He wrote and directed an independent film,
Another Sky
(1956), wrote the screenplay for his own 1963 novel
Inside Daisy Clover
(1965), and scripted
Bitter Victory
(1957),
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
(1961),
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
(1977), and others. His books include
On Cukor
(1972);
The Dangerous Edge
(1975), a study of nine thrillers;
The Goodbye People
(1977);
Running Time
(1983);
Norma Shearer: A Life
(1990);
Nazimova: A Biography
(1997);
Mainly About Lindsay Anderson
(2000); and
Natalie Wood: A Life
(2004). During the 1970s, as Isherwood tells, he settled in Tangier for a time, returning to Los Angeles in the early 1980s.

Lamkin, Hillyer Speed (b. 1928).
American novelist; born and raised in Monroe, Lousiana. Isherwood met him in April 1950 when Speed was twenty-two and about to publish his first novel,
Tiger in the Garden
. He had studied at Harvard and lived in London and New York before going to Los Angeles to research his second novel,
The Easter Egg Hunt
(1954), about movie stars, in particular Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst; he dedicated the novel to Isherwood who appears in it as “Sebastian Saunders.” Lamkin was on the board, with Isherwood, at the Huntington Hartford Foundation. With a screenwriter, Gus Field, he tried to adapt
Sally Bowles
for the stage in 1950–1951, but Dodie Beesley criticized the project and encouraged John van Druten to try instead. In the mid-1950s, Lamkin wrote a play,
Out by the Country Club
, which was never produced, and in 1956, he scripted a T.V. film about Perle Mesta, the political hostess who was Truman's ambassador to Luxembourg. During 1957, he wrote another play,
Comes a Day
, which had a short run on Broadway, starring Judith Anderson and introducing George C. Scott. Eventually, when the second play failed, Lamkin returned home to Louisiana. He appears in
D.1
,
D.2
, and
Lost Years
.

Lamkin, Marguerite (b.
circa
1929).
A southern beauty, born and raised in Monroe, Louisiana, like her brother Speed and briefly educated at a Manhattan finishing school. She followed Speed to Hollywood, and married the screenwriter Harry Brown in 1952, but the marriage broke up melodramatically in 1955 as Isherwood records in
D.1
, where Marguerite is frequently mentioned. Bachardy had a room in the Browns' apartment during the early months of his involvement with Isherwood, and Marguerite was an especially close friend to him. In later years she also became close to Isherwood. She assisted Tennessee Williams as a dialogue coach during the original production of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, and afterwards she worked on other films and theatrical productions on the East and West coasts and in England when southern accents were required. She was married to Rory Harrity from 1959 to 1963, and later settled in London, where she had a successful third marriage, became a society hostess and raised large sums of money for AIDS and HIV research and care. She also appears in
D.2.

Lancaster, Mark (b. 1938).
British artist, raised in Yorkshire, educated at Newcastle. He travelled to New York and Los Angeles while he was still an under graduate writing a thesis on Alfred Steiglitz, appeared in Andy Warhol's films
Kiss
(1963),
Batman Dracula
(1964), and
Couch
(1964), helped Warhol with his silkscreens, and hung around The Factory taking photographs. Back in England, he taught at Newcastle and at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, and from 1968 to 1970 he was the first Artist in Residence at King's College, Cambridge. In 1972, he moved to New York, where he supported his painting by working as secretary and manager to Jasper Johns. He helped Johns to design productions for Merce Cunningham's dance troupe, took over the lighting, and became Artistic Advisor to the company, designing over twenty dances during the 1970s and 1980s. Isherwood first met him with David Hockney on the beach in Santa Monica in 1966. In 1985, Lancaster moved back to England briefly, then lived in Scotland, Miami, and Rhode Island.

Lanchester, Elsa (1902–1986).
British actress; she danced with Isadora Duncan's troop as a child then began acting in a children's theater in London at sixteen. In 1929, she married Charles Laughton and went with him to Hollywood in 1934, settling there for good in 1940 and becoming an American citizen. Lanchester began making films before Laughton did and they acted in several together—for instance
The Private Life of Henry VIII
(1933) and
Witness for the Prosecution
(1957), for which she received an Academy Award nomination. Her most famous film was
The Bride of Frankenstein
(1935), but she was in many more, including
The Constant Nymph
(1928),
David Copperfield
(1935),
Lassie Come Home
(1943),
The Razor's Edge
(1946),
The Secret Garden
(1949),
Come to the Stable
(1949, Academy Award nomination),
Les Misérables
(1952),
Bell, Book and Candle
(1958),
Mary Poppins
(1964), and
Murder by Death
(1976). She also worked in television and for many years she sang at a Los Angeles theater, The Turnabout, on La Cienega Boulevard. She toured with her own stage show,
Elsa Lanchester—Herself
, during 1960 and opened at the 41st Street Theater in New York on February 4, 1961 for seventy-five performances. She met Isherwood socially in the late 1950s, was greatly attracted to him and introduced him to Laughton, afterwards vying with Laughton and Bachardy for Isherwood's attention. In the summer of 1960 Laughton bought 147 Adelaide Drive, next door to Isherwood, so that he could spend time with male friends away from his wife in their house on Curson Avenue; after Laughton died, Lanchester often spent weekends at 147. She appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Lane, Homer (1875–1925).
American psychologist, healer, and juvenile reformer. Lane established a rural community in England called The Little Common wealth, where he nurtured young delinquents with love, farm work, and the responsibility of self-government. For Lane, the fundamental instinct of mankind “is the titanic craving for spiritual perfection,” and he conceived of individual growth as a process of spiritual evolution in which the full satisfaction of the instinctive desires of one stage bring an end to that stage and lay the ground for the next, higher stage; he believed that instinctive desires must be satisfied rather than repressed if the individual is to achieve psychological health and fulfillment. In practice, Lane identified himself with the patient's neurosis in order to allow it to emerge from the unconscious; personally loving the sinner and the sin, he freed the patient from his sense of guilt. Auden discovered the teachings of Homer Lane through his Berlin friend, John Layard, a former patient and disciple of Lane's, and in late 1928 and early 1929, became obsessed with Lane, preaching his theories to his friends and in his poems.